An award-winning English and Social Studies teacher at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif., Larry Ferlazzo is the author of Helping Students Motivate Themselves: Practical Answers To Classroom Challenges, The ESL/ELL Teacher's Survival...

Ivon Prefontaine's insight:

Most of our technology gurus in schools, juridictions, and in the bureaucracies beyond, are promoting their agendas and ideas. This is all well and fine, but be honest and admit it. We need to develop, not policies but genuine conversations within which we mindfully choose the technologies to use, of the many, and apply them to amplify human potential

These changes will have an on-going impact. It will be interesting to see how different education looks in just a few years and how the upward--towards college and the work place--and downward--fro college and the work place--influences will inform each other.

Of course, more and more teachers are using technology today, and any survey will show how active technology, or interactive technology is gaining precendance over static technology. Technology is not just the projector and the white board, rather it is much more than that. While the use of powerpoint and word might be on the decline, current use of technology is aimed at developing online surveys, blogs, google spreadsheets, and google docs. My mentor checks answer sheets, and thesis papers online. She does this for multiple drafts as competently as if she were checking notebooks! The effective use of technology however also depends on back end support from the organisation and institution that encourages the use of technology. This includes software and hardware support to teachers who adhere to the BYOD concept. I have known of organisations that restrict updates of operating systems and antivirus software because they feel that updates might eat into bandwidth. Unfortunately, the BYOD devices of the teachers started to give trouble as lack of updates and patches were not available on time.

Student empowerment is the strongest connective theme through the 55 posts and interviews I’ve conducted for this blog. The educators I’ve interviewed all have one characteristic in common: they all enable students to take more control over and responsibility for their own learning.

Curriculum-as-lived and currere are not new ideas. They have been forming for the last 40 years plus. We did not need digital technologies to come with this idea. It should have been firmly entrenched and it is not.

Student empowerment is the strongest connective theme through the 55 posts and interviews I’ve conducted for this blog. The educators I’ve interviewed all have one characteristic in common: they all enable students to take more control over and responsibility for their own learning.

Tom D'Amico, the Superintendent of Human Resources with the Ottawa Catholic School Board, discusses how his district has met the needs of today's digital learner by focusing on the relationship and scaling of personal networks. Teachers do not dump kids in front of devices. Instead they receive yearly instruction on digital citizenship to model behaviors for students and use researched-based practices to help students learn.

Technology is way too often given a bad rap by administrators and educators as a distraction or a hazard for students. When technology is integrated intentionally with foresight and with intention of addressing specific growth-oriented goals, it increases the potential to help students learn, develop, and grow in unique ways. It can be used to help address the needs as described by Maslow.

There are good ideas. What I find interesting, is I know some Internet sources i.e. blogs that are followed extensively and are written by people who spent little time in the classroom and no nothing about teaching.

Discussions are sometimes called the engine of an online course. Discussions provide an opportunity for students to engage with the course content, with each other, and with you—the professor—simultaneously, which means they have a lot of potential for meaningful learning and high retention.

There is no guarantee that students will really apply themselves by just creating a discussion. What you get out of a discussion assignment depends on what you put into it. Here are some tips for writing your discussion prompt, selecting your settings, and participating in the discussion.

“Teachers at The Nexus Academy of Columbus in Ohio take control of a 4ft -tall (1.2 metre) robot from as far away as Arizona to give lessons. The robot has a screen that shows their face and a camera.”

"In part this stems from his understanding of what science-fiction is for- not to predict the future, but to understand the present with right calls about things yet to happen likely just lucky guesses. Over the weekend I finished William Gibson’s novel The Peripheral, and I will take the humble man at his word as in: “The future is already here- it’s not just very evenly distributed.” As a reader I knew he wasn’t trying to make any definitive calls about the shape of tomorrow, he was trying to tell me about how he understands the state of our world right now, including the parts of it that might be important in the future. So let me try to reverse engineer that, to try and excavate the picture of our present in the ruins of the world of the tomorrow Gibson so brilliantly gave us with his gripping novel."

Jim Lerman's insight:

What an impeccably agile and thorough review of the book, complete with piercing observations on the present and the future -- built upon Gibson's acute vision.

"Taking notes on laptops rather than in longhand is increasingly common. Many researchers have suggested that laptop note taking is less effective than longhand note taking for learning. Prior studies have primarily focused on students’ capacity for multitasking and distraction when using laptops. The present research suggests that even when laptops are used solely to take notes, they may still be impairing learning because their use results in shallower processing. In three studies, we found that students who took notes on laptops performed worse on conceptual questions than students who took notes longhand. We show that whereas taking more notes can be beneficial, laptop note takers’ tendency to transcribe lectures verbatim rather than processing information and reframing it in their own words is detrimental to learning."

The full article may be downloaded from this website without cost. -JL

Whether it’s moribund educational institutions or governments or just bureaucratic red tape, what examples like these show is that the disruption of education continues whether such entities like it or not. Students will find a way to learn if they are given the opportunity, and technology and the social web are providing some powerful ways of doing that.

Jacques Ranciere in The Ignorant School Master wrote about how this happened in the 19th Century without digital technologies. If students are motivated and have the resources they are able to learn. They do not necessarily teach themselves, but they can learn.

Interesting look at tech and edu. Kids will find the information. All we need to do is ask the right questions for them to seek the answers on their own and make their own deductions about where to look and what sources to trust for gathering information.

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